Playing the numbers game in basketball’s MVP debate

Watching Derrick Rose play basketball is one of the great joys in sports right now. Steve Nash wrote on Twitter that while watching tape on Rose, he could only laugh out loud at how good he was. Rose is a thrill, the crackling of electricity on the third rail, the tightrope and the trapeze. And the Chicago Bulls guard seems quite likely to be named the league’s most valuable player.

Unexpectedly, this has sparked a sort of basketball holy war — or at least a holy war of ideas, with numbers at their heart. Welcome to the future.

We have already been through this with baseball, and the holy war there has only begun to die down, a mere 33 years after Bill James published his first Abstract. The quantifying of baseball allowed a new generation of fans and analysts to see the game in a different way — Seattle’s Felix Hernandez won the American League Cy Young award with a 13-12 record last season, which in the pencil-and-paper era of baseball would have been unthinkable.

Well, fancy numbers have come to basketball. It is not like the statistics crowd bloomed overnight; it has been forming, and growing, for years. Daryl Morey launched a class on advanced sports analytics as part of an MBA program at MIT in 2004; he’s now the general manager of the Houston Rockets.

But this year, the wave is hitting the shore, and the MVP debate is the beachhead. Rose’s candidacy is both aesthetically and narratively compelling. When you watch him, you come away with your neurons buzzing. The Bulls were expected to be a middle-of-the-pack team, but have surged to the top of the Eastern Conference despite the fact that their two best big men, Carlos Boozer and Joakim Noah, have combined to miss 57 games; Rose is the only player on the team who can create his own shot, and averages 25.1 points, 7.9 assists, and 4.2 rebounds. He is the engine.

Except, according to the numbers, he is not. The arguments from statistical devotees go like this: Chicago’s best attribute is its league-leading defence, and the defensive numbers are better when Rose is not on the floor. (Note: He is on the floor approximately 78% of the time.) His shooting percentage is just .440; his team’s offensive efficiency is mediocre. There are advanced numbers, too — formulas that agree that Orlando’s Dwight Howard is better. Howard is the choice of those who delve deeply into the calculator side of things.

And it has become a fierce debate in the basketball community, with warring blog posts and Twitter exchanges, much as it was at the beginning of baseball’s civil war. The statheads are massing, and the traditionalists are getting their backs up, and the notion of a romantic view of the game — something that baseball has lost, to a degree, as it has become human math — is under something resembling assault.

But do the numbers explain everything? Can they? According to espn.com’s John Hollinger, one of the high priests of the advanced statistical movement — you can’t be one until you’ve invented a measuring stick, and his is Player Efficiency Rating, or PER — there are holes in the fabric, but there is fabric. Rebounding can be explained; team statistics regarding offence and defence are in the books; shooting has been sliced and diced to a remarkable degree.

“Where we’re at right now is that there are several things we can explain amazingly well, and some things we can’t explain very well at all,” he wrote in an email. “But the big negative right now is that we’re kind of like the Raptors: We suck on defence … basically we’re cavemen when it comes to this end of the floor.”

I agree on a lot of that. But basketball is so complex, with so many interrelated factors, that I’m not sure the numbers can ever find a unifying theory. Basketball is closer to fluid dynamics than baseball — where players stand, how passing works, the combination of 10 men in a defined space — all of it influences every play. Basketball is not a dance. It’s the weather.

Yes, the pace of the game matters more than people think — take a closer look at the 1961-62 season sometime, when Wilt Chamberlain averaged a tidy 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds — and yes, plus-minus numbers can be useful, if collected in great number and weighted for as many factors as you can think of. Yes, I believe numbers have greatly improved our understanding of what is going on out there. Part of being an ardent student of sports is that it feels good to understand.

But I don’t know how much to trust the numbers. Adjusted plus-minus makes some sense, and then you see that the mercurial Vladimir Radmanovic, along with 25 other players, rates better than Rose. PER is useful, but it fails to measure how empty Kevin Love’s numbers are compared to, say, Chris Paul’s. It makes me feel like a flat-earther to reject the advancement of statistics, and so I don’t. But I don’t think we’re close to a blanket way of figuring out the game. In some areas — in the areas of explaining how — I’m not even sure we’re close.

Regardless, basketball has entered a different era now. It will be more complicated, and better understood, and for a time, it will be contentious. It might not be baseball’s civil war, but it will be close, and it won’t be settled for a long time. On-base percentage and slugging percentage was undervalued as recently as 2002, when Moneyball was written by Michael Lewis about the Oakland Athletics. Baseball is now a more logical place than it has ever been.

And basketball is, too. For me, Dwight Howard’s the MVP, sure. But in baseball, the numbers have reversed the old saw favoured by con men everywhere: who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes? In basketball, I’m just not sure that the numbers can’t lie, too.